[FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

This is my first time playing FTC and I thought that it was pretty challenging. Our robot got very specialized and didn't even use other techniques to score. The biggest challenge for us, which the whole game almost revolves around, was the racquetball.

They were not smooth and jams our wheels frequently. They were hard to pick up and just overall difficult to work with. They were all over the field too. This is an opinionated question but what was the hardest game element you had to work with?

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

As the Alamo FTC partner, I have an interest in this poll. I'll bet the GDC might find the input interesting as well. Post away FTC teams!

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

We made some sweet skirts and skid-plates for our robot so we just sort of rolled off of the racquetballs, but we designed our robot primarily to do one thing, lift as many crates as we could as high as we could (We could lift 4 crates ~6 feet). the downside to this was there was little room to mount a ball mover (had we had more time, it would have made it on there), so we were almost totally reliant on our alliance partner to get the crates, put balls in them, and drop them so we could retrieve them. Without such a partner, all we had was a roller to sweep the balls into the crates and the crates and balls were never in the right spot for us to do this. That being said, it would have taken us only seconds to grab 4 upright crates and lift them to full height. Unfortunately, at our only event, few of the other teams could do this and the one of the ones that could was pushed out of alliance picking status just before alliance selection took place, and they really wanted to go into the elims with us. For these reason, I consider the racquetballs to have been the hardest game element for our team to deal with.

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

Who is the GDC? The Game Designers? I'm missing a C, but it's a wild guess.

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

Game Design Committee::rtm:::)

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

Magnet Balls were hard as there are 12 in 100. Can anyone explain why they had trouble? To detect magnet balls, you have to scoop dozens of balls to find at least 1 so I'd suspect you'd find trouble there.

I also suspect that the crates or the racquetballs would pose more of an annoyance since more teams here in California worked with lifts. Some teams focused on the bowling balls so I thought that the ramp would be difficult too, considering its placing.

Thanks also on the GDC info. :)

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

Seems to me the Game Design Committee didn't foresee that crates becoming such a dominant scoring element which is why the bowling ball and magnet balls score higher individually. The short scoring sticks seem to point to that as well..

That's my 2 cents. :)

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

Weather it was intentional or not I noticed that crates going WAY up was probably the best way to get points the day of kickoff. Overall though I do like the fact that the height one robot could lift wasn't capped, it allows for all of us to design bigger and better systems to "one up" the predecessor.

I wonder what the definite max is if someone went all out focusing on just lifting & stacking. I'm sure that one could manage to go 30+ feet. Imagine the points...Imagine the ref scoring that... That being said, everything would have to be absolutely perfect in order for something that high to happen.

- Andrew

Re: [FTC]: Hardest Game Element to Work With?
 

Why are the magnet racquetballs such a nuisance? Was is finding them? Sorting them?